SOLVED

Search on modern communication site, url issue with "siteall" vertical

Steel Contributor

The search box on our communication sites opens a bad url.

 

It redirects to

https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pub/_layouts/15/search.aspx/siteall?q=ict

giving no results at all.

 

If we manually change the url to

https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pub/_layouts/15/search.aspx?q=ict

we get the expected results!

 

The other verticals work ok

https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pub/_layouts/15/search.aspx/sites?q=ict

and 

https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pub/_layouts/15/search.aspx/files?q=ict

are ok.

 

Is this a known issues?

 

13 Replies

Hi!

I'm working on the modern search experience. The idea is that when you search from within a site, the search is scoped to documents from within that site. We have got some feedback that user might want to do a global search for all of sharepoint when searching from a communication site. 

 

If you click on the Sharepoint pice of the search breadcrumb you will upscope to global sharepoint search:

breadcrumb.png

 

 

What do you think? When searching from a site should we do global search of all of sharepoint or should we continue doing a scoped search?

Hello,

 

A MS support engineer told us that we could use the breadcrumb to change the scope. I don't know exactly why we didn't noticed it ourselves. Probably because SharePoint is such a broad term. Maybe a usability test could find out if  "All sites" or "All SharePoint sites" would have been better. Another potential issue is that the end user can only broaden the scope from the current site to global, but not the other way around. I assume this is why you opt for current site as default search scope.

 

We need the global scope because we are slowly migrating to modern sites and pages and almost all of our content is still in old site collections

 

Ideally it would have leveraged the settings from /_layouts/15/enhancedSearch.aspx?level=sitecol where the site admin can define the search scope for that site (collection).

 

For custom PowerApps forms in SharePoint lists, it was possible to reuse a traditional SharePoint setting page for a modern feature, so maybe this could be done here as well until a modern settings page is available.

 

Adding the option to the new Site information side bar could be another option but I guess you don't want to end up cramming all site settings in this side bar.

 

Our temporary solution right now is to hide the out of the box search box with suggestions and replace it with a basic custom build search box redirecting to the global scoped modern search page.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Bart

Thanks for sharing!

 

So I understand a couple of needs here.

 

1. Better highlight the possibility of scoping up (Could be by enhancing the breadcrumb, or by visualizing it in some other way).

2. Make it possible to scope back down to site scope. (See that this is missing, there is a cumbersome way today by searching for the site and expanding the site search result and clicking "search this site", but I can see that this is not the way to do it :) )

3.  Do you think we would need a setting if the UI was good enough at explaining that you are in the scoped search and you have a good way of scoping back down to the current site?

Sounds right.

 

Regarding your question in 3: If one starts from scratch using the new SharePoint paradigm, it would probably makes most sense and would be acceptable to scope to the current site by default, while search in hub sites would scope to the entire hub.

 

However I think it will take a few years before most of the content is moved from old SP site collections to these new sites. If that's the case it's cumbersome for a user, even if it is more intuitive, to broaden the scope on each search request. So I think a setting would bring most value, in the mean time I would set the default to the entire SharePoint scope. This way the user has only "one" direction to consider: narrowing his search through scope and/or filter.

 

Maybe @Agnes Molnar can confirm, or not?

 

Is it possible to override this per site collection?

 

e.g. when user is in tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/global and uses the search then it would by default do global search for whole SharePoint tenant, but when user is in tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/marketingfiles then it would do search only for marketingfiles site collection?

As long as the site is a modern teamsite / commsite / hubsite you will by default be scoped to search within the documents of the current site. To do a global search you will need to upscope the search results page by clicking the Sharepoint link on top of the search results to do a global search. Currently there are not any way of overriding this, but we are working on improving this after among other feedback on tech community:  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Scoping-of-search-in-team-site-communication-sites...

 

Only places you will by default get global search is if you search from Sharepoint home ([TenantName].sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx) or office.com.

Hi,

We have this same issue but I did not find it anywhere registered for Microsoft.

Is there a way to correct the url for the search boxes?

 

 

Hi!
There currently are no way to customize if you want to search in the scope of the site or the tenant wide scope. But we are considering setting default search scope to tenant wide instead of site scoped as the default behavior.

Thank you for information on search scope. I am a SharePoint / Office 365 consultant with years of experience of user requirements related to search and ECM in general. I think it would be great if you could have a tenant or site level setting for default search scope. We used to have something like this in the classic experience :)

 

Btw, are you aware that if you have a classic result page url setting in tenant root, it will still affect Expand search to all SharePoint when searching within a document library in a modern team site (group site)?

Agree! Having an option to choose from in Site Settings to default to All site content would help so many organisations. I've added this idea in the Microsoft User Voice, please vote for it: 

 

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/264636-general/suggestions/36877585-provide-an-option-to-chan...

Let's vote for it using this user voice idea: 

 

Provide an option to change Sharepoint default search without "/siteall?q=" https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/264636-general/suggestions/36877585-provide-an-option-to-chan...

best response confirmed by bart vermeersch (Steel Contributor)
1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by bart vermeersch (Steel Contributor)